


Disrespect

by Khashana, read by Khashana (Khashana)



Series: Disrespect!verse [1]
Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Autistic Zuko, Child Abuse, Cuddles, Friendship, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Ozai’s A+ Parenting, PTSD, Podfic, Podfic Length: 10-20 Minutes, Podfic and fic together, Recovering addiction, Self Harm, oceanography major Katara, polisci major Zuko, rated for above tags, the desire not the actual act but it could def be triggering, there is absolutely no romance here, trying to exist in the world as neurodivergent is constantly being between a rock and a hard place
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-17
Updated: 2020-05-17
Packaged: 2021-03-03 04:13:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,355
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24238609
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Khashana/pseuds/Khashana, https://archiveofourown.org/users/Khashana/pseuds/read%20by%20Khashana
Summary: It's not a trigger he can ask to avoid.That doesn't mean it isn't real.Zuko's already been through the agony of accepting what his father did was wrong. He's gotten therapy. He has coping mechanisms. Shit still happens sometimes.
Relationships: The Gaang & Zuko (Avatar)
Series: Disrespect!verse [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1782586
Comments: 83
Kudos: 1215





	Disrespect

**Author's Note:**

> …I found a new Projection Character guys.  
> I know a thing or two about being fucked up over disrespect and I’ve been having a rough weekend so…writing this was more cathartic than anything else I’ve done about it.
> 
> [Podfic here](https://khashanakalashtar.wordpress.com/portfolio/disrespect/)

“Zuko, do I have your rewritten river survey paper?” says Professor Pakku. Zuko drops his bag back on the floor and crosses to the professor’s desk to riffle through the stack. He’d handed it in with the sediment paper that was actually due today, but maybe the professor wanted it separate. He spots his own name in the upper left corner, MLA-compliant, tugs the paper out, and hands it to Pakku before turning to go back to his seat. “And you narrowed the subject matter as discussed?”

Zuko blinks. “…Professor, if you look at the paper, you’ll see it’s titled Survey of the _Lower_ Yangtze now.” Honestly, the man is literally holding the paper in his hand, and he can’t just glance down at the title? He _knows_ Zuko always leaves his class the second it’s over (and sometimes before) so he can make it to his International Law and the UN class before it starts.

Pakku doesn’t stop him again, so Zuko goes back to his seat, grabbing his bag and checking his watch. He’d better hurry. He glances at Katara, but she’s waiting to talk to the professor, so he heads out the door at a jog.

He feels his phone buzz in his pocket as he’s sitting down, but Professor Jeong Jeong is already talking, and Zuko sits in the front row. No way is he going to pull out his phone right where the professor can see him.

Zuko’s back-to-back Friday morning classes are, thankfully, the only Friday classes he has, and he sits down to lunch ready for his weekend to start. Nobody else is out of class yet, so he grabs a table by himself as usual and pulls out his phone.

There’s the text he didn’t read earlier. It’s from Katara.

 _I know you don’t always pick these things up but that was super rude,_ it says, and dread shudders down Zuko’s throat. _Rude. Rude_ equals _disrespectful._

He doesn’t respond to the text.

It isn’t like it is in books. Zuko doesn’t abandon his lunch, curl up in bed, and refuse to come out for days. He doesn’t fall down in the middle of the dining hall and sink into a panic attack where everyone can see him.

Father would _notice_ that.

No, Zuko _swerves._

He feels the terror wrapping around his throat with clammy hands and the guilt settling in his stomach, and he refuses to feel it. He doesn’t usually do homework over lunch, but today he throws himself into his Democracy and Dictatorship in Europe reading with nothing more or less than his usual hyperfocused determination, because that is simply how Zuko does his homework sometimes. When he’s finished, the second he lets his thoughts wander, they come back to it, unerring as a compass. _You were disrespectful._

Professor Pakku has probably already forgotten about it, he tells himself desperately, or if he hasn’t, he’s just a little annoyed at Zuko. He’ll most likely never bring it up. He certainly isn’t going to hurt Zuko.

_Swerve._

He goes back to his dorm. He practices katas, focusing on breath and stances, pivot and no wasted movement, first modified to fit in his dorm room, and then out on the lawn when the need to do them right overtakes the desire to stay hermited. He practices until he’s hungry, and then he focuses on food. Or he tries to.

 _Do the gang want to eat dinner_ leads to _Katara_ leads to _Professor Pakku_ leads to _disrespectful._ Zuko fights off the fear and shame and thinks only of what’s for dinner and fakes his way through it.

No one notices.

It’s not their fault. He knows that, on both an intellectual and a gut level, and doesn’t blame them. He is good at faking it. He has to be. Father might be abusive, but that does not make him _stupid._ So Zuko smiles and laughs and participates in conversation, even with Katara, and eats a full meal. He can’t bury the simmering low-level panic completely, because Katara is right there, but he doesn’t show it.

Friday nights are sword practice, so he meets up with the rest of Randal’s group in the Great Hall and takes a set of shaungdao from Randal’s large mahogany chest. He can lose himself in this, in the precision of movement, much the same way he can in karate. He can forget entirely about Katara and Professor Pakku and _disrespectful_ like this, even feel genuinely happy, allowing Randal’s praise to wash over him.

_Swerve._

He keeps it up until he’s in bed, and he even reads for longer than usual, but he can’t stave off sleep forever, and at half past one in the morning, he’s staring out the window next to his bed, wide awake and, devoid of other options, letting his feelings overtake him.

_Disrespectful. Disrespectful. Disrespectful._

Zuko could apologize, and Professor Pakku would accept it, he _knows_ he would, but that would mean admitting he knows what he did, handing the vulnerability of it right to Pakku and asking to be hurt.

He knows Professor Pakku wouldn’t hurt him, and he knows with even greater certainty that he still can’t do it.

How is he ever supposed to look Pakku in the eye again?

He tries to look over the conversation objectively. He still feels justified in his frustration, though he acknowledges that he didn’t have to say it like that. But it doesn’t stop the guilt.

His scar doesn’t do anything so thematically obvious as start tingling, or aching with years-old pain, but he’s aware of its presence on his face in a way he usually isn’t. Not that Zuko is ever able to forget about it, of course, not with the way people look at him, the flinches and the curious stares and the way small children will sometimes be afraid of him. But that’s a much more abstract awareness, a set of labels he applies to himself: scarred, ugly, angry-looking. This is more of a specific awareness of exactly where it is on his face, where its borders are, exactly where sensation dulls and skin tightens.

 _Hurt yourself,_ says the voice in his head. _Hurt yourself, you deserve it, it’s the only way to forgive yourself, to stop feeling so goddamn guilty over this._

The skin of his arms aches with a longing for his lighter. He starts to shake, until he forces his muscles to relax and out-stubborns the panic.

 _It’s lying to you,_ he tells himself firmly. _It might help at first, but only for a minute, it’s lying, all that will do is throw away two years of being clean, all that will do is mean you have to get up tomorrow and tell your friends you relapsed._

He’s stronger than his addiction, he knows that, and the certainty calms him a little. He thinks about texting someone, just to feel a little less alone, but he doesn’t know how to say ‘I want to hurt myself, but I don’t need you to talk me out of it’ in a way they’ll believe and besides. If he’s honest with himself, it would hurt more to get no response (never mind it’s late and he knows perfectly well they’re all asleep if they know what’s good for them) then it would help if someone did.

He can save himself, and it’s this thought that lets him relax enough to roll over and go to sleep.

The terror is a little less after a night of sleep, but now that the self-harm intrusive thought is here, he can’t ditch it.

He has gotten to the point already where this isn’t an every-day problem anymore. As of two days ago, it was down to every couple of weeks, sometimes as little as once a month, whenever he did something wrong—bad grade on an assignment, _hurt yourself,_ shouted at Aang and made him make that sad face, _hurt yourself_ , but his brain was slowly narrowing its definition of ‘doing something wrong’ (which, back in freshman year, included such gems as ‘procrastinated’ and ‘freaked your friends out’) and he was getting better at letting the thought drift in and then out again the way his therapist talked about.

But now? Now Zuko’s sitting in the common room of Sokka and Toph’s dorm, surrounded by his friends, trying to write next week’s Marine Geology paper and only managing to divorce the subject matter from the professor long enough to write a couple words at a time.

He gives up and starts his UN reading instead, and that works a little better. He’s able to lose himself in it for pages at a time, but every time he surfaces, there it is again, _disrespectful,_ followed by _hurt yourself._

For a moment, he really thinks about packing up, walking to the campus store, and buying a new lighter.

 _You’re stronger than your addiction,_ he reminds himself again, and the impulse fades back to its new baseline of _always fucking there but without any real intent behind it_.

Zuko is far, far too good at living in his father’s house to slip by accident, do something his friends will notice.

But maybe he can let them in on purpose.

Toph is sitting next to him, on the other side of the couch with her earbuds in, listening to her economics textbook. Zuko sets his laptop on the floor, every motion deliberate and decided, and scoots across the center of the couch. She hears him coming and lifts her arm to let him snuggle up under. With her other hand, she pauses her phone.

“You okay, Sparky?”

He sighs, feeling himself on a precipice. He shakes his head where it’s pressed against her shoulder.

Around him, the quiet of four people studying hardens into actual silence.

“How bad?” asks Sokka gently. Katara gets up and comes to curl around Zuko’s other side.

“I’m not gonna burn myself,” says Zuko.

“But you want to,” finishes Katara for him, empathy audible in every word. She takes his hand and laces her fingers through it.

Sokka plops down on the other side of Toph. who pats her lap. Zuko takes the offer and adjusts to lay across it, head ending up on Sokka’s knee. Katara follows, draping herself along his back, and Aang joins her, blanketing his front.

“What’s up, Zuko?” he asks, and Zuko knows he’s making the sad face, but for once he accepts it.

“I was disrespectful to Professor Pakku yesterday,” he says quietly, and Katara makes a wounded noise, putting it together now he’s used the synonym.

“I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t have sent you that text.”

“No!” He tries to twist to look at her, with limited success. “You can’t just not tell me! It’s still wrong, and I still need you to call me out on it. It’s just, I didn’t usually understand what was disrespectful about anything when my father called me out on it, and he wouldn’t _explain_ it. Some of the time, I think he just didn’t like what I had to say, didn’t matter what tone of voice I said it in or what words I used. But when I asked him to tell me what was wrong with what I’d said, he’d just get even angrier.”

Sokka’s hand has made its way to his shoulder, gripping tightly, and Toph’s hand is wound through his hair.

It’s near enough a goddamn miracle that Zuko _doesn’t_ second-guess literally everything he says, he knows that. He agonizes over writing emails, over talking to important people, but he isn’t built to be unobtrusive and he can mostly get through his daily life without having to actively censor himself. His friends understand how his brain works, and they’re blunt with him when he needs them to be and don’t expect him to pick up on subtext or social cues or make extended eye contact.

“Zuko,” says Aang quietly, “are you punishing yourself for being autistic in a way that inconveniences people again?”

“I—uh.” He stops and tries to process that. “I don’t think so?”

“You’re not an inconvenience,” says Sokka firmly. “Just in case you needed to hear that again.”

“Do you understand what was wrong with what you said?” asks Katara gently.

“I implied he was an idiot.” Semi-acceptable callout for close friends. Not acceptable for authority figures or strangers. It’s a rule he’s memorized, not one he’s internalized a belief in. If it’s reasonable to point out when someone is being dense, it should be reasonable no matter who it is. But it does matter, that much is obvious, because he can get away with expressing all sorts of opinions to his friends, and barely any to his father.

“You don’t usually imply your teachers are idiots, right?” says Katara.

“I’m usually less frustrated with them,” he mutters.

“So it’s a slip-up, not a pattern, and it’s okay,” she says. “You’re allowed to make mistakes.”

He kind of wants to scoff at that one.

“I still need you to tell me if it happens and I don’t notice,” he says instead. If he can’t rely on his friends to call him out, he’s going to start worrying that he’s accidentally offended them and they’re just too worried about hurting him to tell him.

“We do that all the time,” says Toph. “It doesn’t usually lead to you falling apart in my lap talking about _burning_ yourself.” Even as she says it, her hand on his head presses harder, letting him know she isn’t trying to tell him to get out of her lap.

“We aren’t authority figures,” Sokka points out. “Most people in his life aren’t authority figures, at least not ones he feels any loyalty to.” _Unlike his teachers and his dad,_ he doesn’t say.

“I need you to tell me,” Zuko insists.

“Okay,” says Aang. “We’ll keep telling you. As long as you tell us when _this_ happens so we can pile on top of you and make it better again.”

Something inside Zuko relaxes, and he lets himself be held. This, too, shall pass.

**Author's Note:**

> I appreciate people pointing out SPAG errors, particularly tense changes, but I do not accept plot/characterization-related concrit. If you didn't like it, just hit the back button.
> 
> I could have given Zuko Professor Piandao for sword practice, but somehow I can’t see Piandao being liberal with the praise, so I gave him my own pentjuk silat teacher instead. He also taught swords, though I didn’t take that class.
> 
> If you are not stronger than your addiction, that’s okay. If you relapsed after a long period of being clean, you still have value. This is just one experience of existing as a recovering addict. 
> 
> Friends can’t save you from yourself. Friends can’t be the only thing standing between you and the darkness. But by god, not having friends makes everything so much worse.
> 
> This fic is dedicated to a dear friend with a flawless mask that kept her family from noticing she was sick for two years and her friends from noticing she was being abused for months. It isn’t a reflection on us that we couldn’t tell. It’s a very well honed defense mechanism.
> 
> Is there an ATLA discord server where people would appreciate this kind of content?
> 
> Edited to add: Y'all, I am BLOWN AWAY by the response to this fic. It's rocketed up to seventh most kudos of all my work (of which there are 70). And so many comments! And they're so heartfelt! I keep rereading the fic every time I get one and falling more in love with it.  
> Anyway come [follow me on tumblr](https://khashanakalashtar.tumblr.com/) if that's a thing you do! I reblog a lot of ATLA and even occasionally post snippets.


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